Alien Avatar: An Alien Sci-Fi Romance Page 16

  His flashlight illuminated the shape of another shambling Halian corpse, a Husk, Jintak had called them. And there was another, a few years behind the first, and behind that one, many, many more.

  When Jintak began to back with wide eyes, Marko figured that it would be a good time to join him. He stood tall in his combat form, his head only barely clearing the ten-foot tall ceilings. It occurred to him that his current form might not be the best thing in the world for making all of the Husks feel loved. When every military recruit learns their combat form, one of the considerations is a shape that is physically and psychologically imposing.

  He couldn’t channel his emotions to the Husks the way that the Halians could, but he could still make the bleak environment a little more welcoming and pleasant. He thought quickly, trying to imagine the least threatening thing that he could.

  With a deep breath and a prayer that this might just work, he shifted out of his combat form an into the shape of a young pennginn. He saw the closest Husk look down, its attentions immediately directed at his new shape.

  “Marko?” Naeesha asked, as much confused as she was concerned. He looked up at her, blinked his tiny bead eyes and flapped his stubby wings. His paddle-flipper-feet would have been effective if he was swimming through the freezing cold water of the polar oceans, but weren’t much good at running away from murderous creatures.

  He felt ridiculous, posturing like this, looking pleadingly at Naeesha past his short beak. She must have got the message, because she bent down and gingerly picked him up, cradling his small downy body under her arm. All that he could do was hope that he and Naeesha were doing something to warm the leathery cockles of the Husks’ hearts.

  Jintak and the crowd continued to pray as they backed away from the Husks, but the feeling of love and compassion wasn’t as strong as it had been earlier, and he wondered if it would be enough to stop the encroaching monsters. He couldn’t get a sense of how many of them there were in the darkness. The crowd of them was so thick that their lights only made it a few feet into the horde. Whether there were ten or ten thousand behind them, Marko had no idea.

  The shambling horde drew closer, and Jintak’s prayers and love had yet to render even one of them into dust. Halians were falling over their supplies, and each other. Everyone was scrambling, trying to get away, but the chaos and the confusion was taking its toll and there was a massive pile-up of panicking people.

  And Marko couldn’t do a damn thing about it, because he was a small flightless bird.

  Not that there was much else he could do. Anything that scared or intimidated the Husks would make them stronger, and that meant that more of his tribe would die. He had to protect them. He had to protect Naeesha. And that meant standing back and letting Jintak and the tribe do what they had to do.

  He only hoped they would do it faster.

  The tribe’s retreat slowed to a crawl, and then stopped. There was nowhere else to go, the knot of people was packed too tightly to unravel any more. Only Jintak stood between the encroaching monsters and his people.

  He held his arms outstretched and walked towards the horde in a final act of loving defiance. The horde overwhelmed him, swallowed him. An intense sadness rocked the tribe. Mako felt it deep in his chest like a knife wound to the heart, twisting and cutting.

  The feeling of sadness transformed into a triumphant love for the Halian that had led so much of the tribe for so long. A resounding memory of trust and goodwill. A melancholy acknowledgement of his sacrifice for their shared purpose.

  It stopped the horde in its tracks.

  A sea of empty, pitted eyes stared back from the darkness. The Husks stood still, their jaws gaping, their expressions betraying the same mournful joy that Marko was feeling now, but only for a moment.

  In an instant, every leathery body in the Husk army evaporated into a thin cloud of swirling dust, and fell to the ground, coating it like an early winter snowfall.

  Jintak’s lifeless body lay a few feet in front of the stunned Halian crowd, crushed and broken. There was no fear on his face, only calm acceptance. The tribe stood silently, mourning, grieving, and reflecting on the lost life of their leader. Everybody felt the loss. Everybody shared the burden.

  A pair of elders, followed by a long procession of Halians, moved through the crowd carrying a stretcher. They went to Jintak’s side, reverently lifted him onto the stretcher, and lifted his body into the air.

  Marko shifted back to his natural form and took Naeesha’s hand. Neither of them could bring themselves to move or speak, they just watched as the Halian’s filed past their fallen leader, touching him, saying farewell, and leaving small tokens for him to take into the next world.

  With a deep breath, Marko stepped forward, joining the somber procession. He looked down and saw the stranger who had welcomed him into his family. He saw the friend who had guided him through years of turmoil. And he saw the leader who was strong enough to carry thousands on his frail back.

  He lay a hand on Jintak’s shoulder, said goodbye, and walked into the darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The rear guards were the only ones who knew what time it was. The middle of the night, they’d said. Four hours until it was time to pack up. But nobody wanted to go back to sleep. Nobody could. The Halians picked up their things and left.

  Marko and Naeesha followed, hand in hand, lost in the crowd.

  It was nearly two hours into their walk before the ground beneath their feet cleared of the remnants of the Husk swarm. At times, the remains of their withered bodies piled up to their knees. Naeesha couldn’t imagine how many of the tortured souls had been stuffed into the black and empty hallway, or how they had come to be there.

  The tribe was silent. Only the sound of their shuffling footsteps kept the crushing quiet at bay. They went on like that hours, mindlessly stumbling forward into the dark, no different from the Husks, save for the fact that no member of the tribe could feel loneliness.

  They were surrounded by each other. The sense of community, of shared struggle, was too strong to deny. No matter what horrors awaited them, everybody in the tribe, Naeesha included, knew that they would not have to face them alone.

  And so they kept pushing into the unknown.

  After nearly six hours of constant walking, the crowd came to a stop. Something was said, and passed along down the miles-long crowd until the words finally reached Marko and Naeesha.

  “Come,” Marko said. “They’re calling for the warriors to go to the front.”

  Naeesha froze for a second. She’d been a fighter for nearly her entire life, but she’d never thought of herself as a warrior. She’d never had cause to. And now she wondered what it was worth? What good was fighting when it only made your enemy stronger?

  But if somebody called for a warrior, then it was her duty to answer, so she walked forward, hand in hand with Marko, and pushed her way to the front of the group, weapons at the ready.

  She wasn’t sure what she expected to find. More Husks, maybe. Perhaps something worse. Something that had driven them down the tunnel. Whatever had killed the soldier way back at the tunnel entrance, a jungle animal that had made its way down here, maybe a Watcher ambush.

  What she actually found was a series of tunnels that broke off of the main junction. It was the first time they’d seen anything but straight tunnel walls, and the effect was almost startling. The assembled squad of fighters crept forward to investigate the branches of the tunnels. There were hundreds of them, as far as they could see into the darkness, a few feet apart from each other on both sides of the walls.

  They looked into the first one. A heavy iron door stood open a few feet back, and lead to a room, not much bigger than a closet. Naeesha peered inside. Bare floor. Concrete walls. But the walls weren’t smooth like the rest of the tunnel. They were grooved and rough and chipped and it was with complete horror that Naeesha realized that the thousands of marks were from fingernails.

  The room across
the hall was the exact same way. So were the next ten, and the hundred after that. There was no end to the hellish rooms in sight. The warriors walked down the hallway with military silence, checking to make sure that every room was empty. There were small piles of dust in some of them. A few of the doors were still closed. No attempt in trying to open them was successful.

  There were miles and miles of the cells. Naeesha shuddered to imagine each one of them containing a tortured Halian, alone and afraid for how long, she didn’t dare think.

  After several more hours of walking, the tunnels stopped suddenly.

  “Five thousand, two hundred and sixty,” Marko said.

  “What?”

  “That’s how many cells there were. Give or take.”

  Naeesha looked back over her shoulder. She was glad that it was all behind her.

  When the smooth walls stopped again and new tunnels broke off to the sides, she nearly started to cry. But these passageways were different. She could only see a few, spread hundreds of feet apart. They didn’t lead to small rooms, but to cavernous chambers, hundreds of feet long and fifty feet wide. There were beds, cabinets, desks. It looked like a field hospital.

  And then there were the bodies.

  Watcher, mostly. The dusty remains of Husks covered a few of them. Most of the beds were empty, but there were still dozens of corpses, each of them strapped down to the vinyl-covered mattresses. Small metal carts, all of them loaded with miscellaneous medical equipment, were scattered around the rooms.

  An unfinished ration sat on one of the desks. Empty intravenous bags still hung from trees beside the beds, the tubes having long fallen out of their decaying patients.

  It looked like whatever the place was, it was abandoned in a hurry. Naeesha walked through the haunting room and left through a door at the other end, just as Marko walked out from the wing on the other side of the hall. The blank, numb expression on his face told her that he’d seen the same thing she had.

  Even the emotionally hardened Halian warriors who’d come with them couldn’t contain their disgust and hatred. As they filed back into the hall, they sat against the walls and meditated, their simmering rage slowly cooling.

  There as another mile of the awful hospital wings. Naeesha tried to make sense of what had taken place in the terrible chambers by the equipment that had been left out. It didn’t look like a military hospital. She would have expected to see bandages, splints, burn salves, trays full of shrapnel. None of that was present.

  Instead, there were scalpels, forceps, imaging equipment, and retractors. Exploratory surgery equipment. None of it was meant for putting people back together. It was meant for taking them apart.

  By the time she’d made it through the second room, she couldn’t help herself any more. She turned back into the hall and threw up. Marko tried to soothe her, but there was no fixing what she’d seen. As someone who’d spent so much of her career as a healer, this was too much.

  “I’m right here,” Marko said, holding her tight as she shook uncontrollably, the sobs wracking her body as she struggled to breathe against them. “They’re gone. Whoever did this, they’re gone.”

  Naeesha would have liked to think that he was right. But just because the people who’d done this weren’t here right now didn’t mean that they weren’t somewhere.

  She dried her eyes, caught her breath, and straightened herself up. Whoever did this, whoever was responsible for so much suffering, there would be signs of their identity somewhere in these rooms.

  As a promise to the bodies on the journeys, to the Husks in the hall, and to whoever else might still be suffering, she pledged to find out who had done this, and put an end to them.

  The tribe was quickly catching up to the expeditionary force, which meant that it was time for Naeesha to get moving, along with the rest of the expeditionary force. They kept moving down the hallway, investigating another three medical rooms, learning nothing more about the people who’d committed the evil that they were now looking at.

  After going through the last room, signs of the outside began to appear in the hallway. A few leaves here. A scurrying beetle there. Naeesha was so focused on looking for signs of sunlight up ahead that she didn’t notice the ground beneath her feet until she tripped over something soft and heavy, like a rotting log.

  She caught her balance and turned around to see that she’d tripped over a leg. Not a body, just a leg. Sweeping her light over the ground in front of her, she found the once-owner of that leg, along with a dozen or more Watchers in lab coats. All of the bodies had been there for a while, and most of them had been visited by scavengers at one point or another

  As ugly as the sight was, she could only feel righteous satisfaction that the monsters responsible for the things she’d seen that day had met the right fate.

  Past the corpses was a heavy metal door like the one they’d seen at the other end of the tunnel. Only this one was totally destroyed. Naeesha looked at the four-inch thick slab. It had been bent like a sheet of paper, ripped out of the concrete wall, and crumpled against the wall. She could only imagine what had caused the destruction. It wasn’t an explosion. At least, there were no signs of one.

  She wondered if one of the Halian research subjects had been pushed too far and went Wild. All of the signs were there, but she had no idea that a Wild Halian could do this, or at least, what kind of anger it would take.

  Marko stepped past the ruined door and she followed after. The ground was littered with leaves, animal bones, and matted fur. Something had chosen to make its home down here. She only hoped that it had since moved on. The thought of bringing any more death to these tunnels made her sick.

  There was no glorious sunlight, as she had hoped, but there was soft light coming into the tunnel a few feet ahead. There was a pile of rubble spilling through one of the walls, and a chunk of the ceiling was out of place. As they drew closer, Naeesha held her breath, hoping to see the sky when she looked through it.

  “Whoa,” Marko said.

  She couldn’t even form a word. The air rushed out of her lungs in a deep sigh.

  It was raining. The sky was a light blue-grey, heavy clouds swirled overhead, blowing north with purpose. A little light made it through, just enough to cast the world in a flat, sad grey.

  It was beautiful.

  Naeesha walked up into the world above, completely unaware and uncaring about the world around her. She stared into the sky and drank in the rain. It had never really sunk in how much she’d missed them. The confining walls and impenetrable darkness had robbed her of them, and she hadn’t even noticed.

  Marko came and stood beside her. His thin robe clung to his body, soaking wet already. He shivered, but looked happier than she’d ever seen him. Naeesha cloaked him in her arms, holding him close as they both stared up at the sky, begging it to forgive them for leaving it, praying that it would take them back into the world above.

  She didn’t know whether it was just being underground, or what they had seen there, but she did know that she never wanted to go back. Even with no idea of where they were, or how much further they had to go, she knew that she wanted to continue the journey above. She just hoped that the rest of the tribe would agree.

  One by one, they began to come up out of the darkness. Every single one of them reacted the same way, staggering up the pile of rubble with their heads tilted up and their jaws hanging open. Naeesha and Marko joined the other warriors in guiding the stunned Halians away from the entrance so that others could come up.

  After she watched the surviving members of the tribe come up and see the sky, she no longer doubted what they would chose to do when the time came to make the decision about how to proceed.

  She could feel the joy and the reverence that they felt building on top of her own. It was almost enough to make her forget about the days in the tunnel and the horrors that they’d seen there. And then she saw Jintak, carried high on the shoulders of the people that he had carried for so long.
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  Something inside of her broke.

  Chapter Forty

  Marko stood under the awning of the dining hall and watched the Halians go about their afternoons. He appreciated the way that they mourned with celebration, and he could feel how genuinely happy they were - happy to be alive, happy to have known Jintak and the others who had died in the tunnels, happy to be carrying their legacy.

  But he couldn’t make it work for himself. Watching them work and dance and laugh under the slate grey sky, listening to the sounds of joyful music getting lost in the drone of the steady rain. It all made him feel so small. He’d spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen, keeping his hands busy, freeing someone else to join in the wake.

  The work was done now, and he was trying to figure out what to do with himself. He thought about going out and joining the dancers, but he couldn’t make himself move. He felt rusted over, like a force had taken over his body, seizing his joints, and that it took all of his energy just to walk or talk or think.

  He wanted to find Naeesha, just to be with her, but she was off somewhere. He’d seen her like this once before, the first time one of her trainees had been killed in combat. She’d found the woman - a human like her - after a fierce firefight with Halian insurgents. Naeesha field stabilized her, carried her back to their transport, and tried to perform surgery while the autopilot took them back to base.

  Marko had found her sitting in the back of the shuttle, covered in blood that didn’t belong to her, just staring. Not crying, not shouting, just staring. He wished he’d known better than to interrupt her that time. He’d interrupted to ask if she was okay. Naeesha didn’t say anything. She just turned her head until her gaze met Marko’s. The few seconds that their eyes locked were some of the most terrifying in his life.

  He gave her space, making sure that nobody bothered her, and that’s what he was going to do now. He just wished that he didn’t need her so much. But he would get by. He would be okay.