Anthem's Fall (28 page)

George’s hand was still resting on his holster. He attempted to bring his mind back to his training at the academy in Montpelier twenty years previous as he pulled out his gun and clicked off the safety. The voice of his old grizzly Army vet instructor rang through his ears.
Keep your composure! Always be ready to call for backup!

But there was no such luxury as backup in Huntington, aside from the neighborhood watch and the prostrate young man beside him. George would have to take control of the situation by himself until the State Police could arrive.

“W-what is going on here?” George was barely able to enunciate the question, but felt somewhat empowered with the gun now in his hand.

The giant closer to the house turned and laughed with unmistakable amusement.

“Porskis farzalork veesh sa.”
The giant moved his monstrous leg a step toward George and laughed when George retreated backward a step. The giant dwarfed over the six-foot-tall officer as though George were an elementary school boy holding a toy gun.

“George, I want to go. I want to go right now. This isn’t right,” Mike said from the grass.

George Henderson held his ground.

“What have you done with the Jansons?” George mounted up the courage and demanded, though his voice still sounded weak and lacked conviction. He cocked his gun, pointing it at the approaching behemoth. “Don’t think I won’t use this!”

The other giant turned to the house and yelled with a voice as deep as the first.
“Yariles vengeliskah!”

A young man suddenly strode out of the house through the sliding patio doors. He looked to be in his late teens or early twenties, and was wearing the same strange attire as the giants. Although he looked like an athlete, his appearance was much less monstrous than the other two. Where the vacuous faces of the giants could have passed for wild animals, this smaller man’s face was lined with sophistication. Although the young man certainly did not look like he came from Vermont—George likened him to a professional athlete or some sort of celebrity type—he did appear to be
human
, which was encouraging.

Judging by the body language of the two giants, it was obvious even to George that this new arrival was the one in command. The young man looked at the gun aimed in his direction and shook his head with unmistakable disdain.

“Please tell me you speak this language. Yes?” the mysterious young man asked. His voice was calm, articulate, and carried no accent whatsoever.

“W-what is going on here? Where are the Jansons?” George shouted and stepped forward, keeping the gun aimed at the smaller man. The young man’s face remained unwavering, almost tiresome, as the gun pointed directly at him.

“I have no intent on harming you. Put the weapon away,” the young man said. “All I need is for you to tell me where we are. My men and I have no quarrel with you gentlemen or the family in the house.”

“Where are the Jansons?” George shouted.

The young man frowned. “Are you slow? I just said they’re in the house. Again, I need to know where we are on Filg—
Earth
. I found a map in the house but I don’t know where we are located on it. That is all. Then we are out of your way.” The young man ran a hand across his chin, and George noticed a gigantic red ring on his finger. “This region seems isolated. You’ll be safe here.”

“Now excuse me, son! You are talking to a police officer! I need to see the family bef—”

“Enough!” the young man snapped. “You are a soldier of your people, not a group of children and an old woman like that family. I won’t hesitate to rip your arms off to get what I want. Or you can simply give me what I want, and we can go our separate ways.”

George was frozen, his mind lost in shock. He could sense Mike trembling beside him. Mike had also drawn his gun, but his back was still on the grass.

“Get against the house and put your hands behind your head!” George yelled, pushing his gun toward the young man.

“Decide,” the young man said with a cold finality.

A deafening bang pierced the tense silence as Mike fired his handgun from his ground position. Simultaneously, the young man stretched out his hand. A moment of silence passed, then the young man looked down at Mike as though he were a petulant child. A smoking and deformed bullet was resting in between the young man’s thumb and forefinger. He let the bullet go and it fell dramatically into the grass.

The young man turned and looked to one of the giants and spoke a phrase in the unusual language. One of the monsters lurched forward with surprising speed. He raised his foot and brought it down on Mike’s chest. The enormous foot was nearly the size of the rookie’s entire midsection. Popping sounds filled the yard as Mike’s ribcage split. Mike frantically aimed the gun at the giant and emptied half the clip. Five shots. The giant looked down at him and shook his head as he stomped his foot on his chest, killing him instantly.

George frantically pointed his gun at the giant, his body convulsing.

“What do you want from us?” he sputtered, terrified.

“Are you serious?” the young man demanded with a dubious look. “I
just
told you. I want to know our location. If your friend here had just given me what I wanted, he would still be alive and well.”

“O-o-o-okay. Okay. We are in Huntington.”

“Huntington. Good. See? Now we are making progress,” the young man said. “What is Huntington?”

The circuitry of George’s mind was quickly fraying, and he was losing touch with reality. He felt a mordant nausea rise from his stomach to the back of his throat. “What the hell is going on?” he gasped through quick breaths.

The young man snapped his fingers impatiently, as one would to a dog. “Stay with me here. Your life is on the line.”

“Huntington. Huntington, V-Vermont.”

The stranger sighed and shook his head impatiently. “Okay, this isn’t getting us anywhere. Look, I need to find New York City. I placed it on this map, but I don’t know where we are.”

“New Y-York? Why do you want to go there?”

“Where are we?” the young man ignored his question and walked up to George holding a map of the United States.

“We’re here,” George said, pointing a trembling finger to northern New England.

The young man nodded with a contented expression. “Wasn’t that easy?” he looked at George as he shook violently.

“Y-y-yes,” George said as he watched the giant who had stepped on Mike wipe the gore off his boot on the patchy grass. George leaned over, hands falling to his knees, and vomited on the grass.

The English-speaking man stepped closer to him and kneeled down beside him, looking disgusted. “You two were the first ones to fire your weapons—intending to kill us. I acted no more uncouth or boorish than you did.”

The young man then turned on the spot and exploded upward into the sky, becoming a rippling dark dot in the glaring blue between the trees almost instantly. The two giants followed in his wake, flying over the mountaintop and out of sight behind a thin white cloud. George looked back and forth from the sky to the corpse of Mike Fuller.

George Henderson attempted to walk to his cruiser, but the blood rushed out of his head and he fainted in the yard.

T
he lack of answers was gnawing at Vengelis as he looked down on the sprawling lands of Filgaia. In Master Tolland’s last moment of life, amid the indescribable carnage of Sejeroreich, this peculiar place had come to his mind. Master Tolland had thought of this place
and
of a salvation from the Felixes.

The two were somehow connected.

Far below, rolling hills dotted with town centers and fields passed by. A thin ribbon of highway snaked north to south, and Vengelis followed the faint reflections of tiny windshields that glinted in the sun. Having spent many healing hours in the medical rooms before the
Harbinger I
touched down, his features were back to normal. He looked every bit the Royal son once again, but Vengelis regarded his healed face with bitter embarrassment. It was the face of a failed sentinel. Though his expression was free of bruises and lacerations, there were shadows of sleeplessness under his tired eyes.

The Felixes haunted his every waking thought. The memory of the rampant death in Sejeroreich had rendered sleep impossible for many nights. Even now, under the brilliant sun, Vengelis saw only the eyes of the machines. The startling blue gaze filled him with an enervate dread. Vengelis had never felt so powerless. The Felixes had beaten him, and so too had the complexity of Pral Nerol’s research. He could not handle either. From what he could piece together, Pral Nerol and his researchers had used Primus blood to create the machines that nearly took his life. The Felixes used Primus cells to architect their own form. This made intuitive sense to Vengelis, as the machines
were
Primus. Yet Vengelis recalled striking the blonde Felix in the temple. The side of her head had felt like a block of heavy iron against his knuckles. He remembered the profound ringing sound of the impact—it was as though he had struck a giant gong. There was nothing natural about that skull, or that woman.

“What is the plan?” Hoff called over the rushing air as the three unwelcome visitors soared southward across the expansive sky.

“While I was researching on the ship, I found a planned meeting of scientists that’s going on today in a city to our south,” Vengelis yelled into the wind, which pushed back his hair and roared in his ears. “I’ve had Pral Nerol’s research translated into their languages. My plan is to arrive at this meeting, present the scientists with Nerol’s work on the Felixes, and demand that they help me unravel its cryptic nature. If I can learn anything, it will be worth the effort. From there, I do not yet know what our long-term plan will be.”

“And what if they don’t give in to your requests?” Darien asked.

“They will,” Vengelis said, and brought his attention to the blurred collision of navy skies and rolling hills against the southern horizon. “Based off the reaction of those people in the woods, I’d say it’s clear we aren’t going to blend in here—or at least not you two. I got the impression that family in the house thought I was a human and you both were . . . something else. They were begging me to help them get away from the two of you. Also those men with the firearms were terrified before they even realized their weapons were useless. Judging by that behavior, I think there’s something unnatural about both of your appearances. I’ll venture a guess it is your sizes.”

“They’re so small with their little guns,” Hoff called. Vengelis turned to him with an expression of cool disdain, and Hoff quickly clarified his meaning. “Small as in weak, not in a Royal sense.”

“Not everyone was
bred
, Lord General. But small or large, I want to attract as little attention as possible until the time is right. It would be advantageous to catch the scientists off guard. The last thing I want is for an alarm to sound and cities to evacuate before I have a chance to corral them.”

“So what will you have us do?” Darien asked.

“I’m going to visit the city alone and attempt to immerse myself among them, at least for a short while. But that’s not my intention for the two of you. We will have to separate. I think it’s safe to assume you both will cause a panic if you step foot in a populated area. Or at the very least, you’ll inadvertently do something that will result in panic. It doesn’t require a stretch of the imagination to envision a scenario escalating.” Vengelis shook his head. “I’m not going to take any chances. I will go to this city alone. There’s too much on the line here to take an unnecessary gamble.”

“Then should we head back to the ship and wait?” Hoff asked, failing to conceal the disappointment in his tone as he scanned the boundless landscape far below.

“No, no. There’s only a small chance that the scientists will be able to help me to begin with. But I will need them to realize there is nothing they can do to stop our will.”

Darien turned to him and called out, “How?”

“They need to be shown there will be no negotiating with us,” Vengelis shouted over a loud gust of wind. “We don’t have the time to make requests or respectfully ask for their help. I will present the scientists with a straightforward choice. Either help me in my understanding of the Felixes, or face total annihilation.”

The Lord General veered in close to Vengelis, this development piquing his interest. “And where do Darien and I come into this?”

“You two will show them a vision of their obliteration at our hands.”

“How?”

“Simple.” Vengelis’s face was stone. “Devastate them until they unequivocally surrender to our command. I can think of no better way to expedite our errand. My hope is to return to Anthem while there are still people left to save. As such, you two will demonstrate a succinct and irrefutable display of our power, and I will gain absolute submission.”

“What will be the nature of our display?”

“You will maim one of their cities in the most brazen manner you can muster. At the same time I, after gaining their compliance, will force the greatest of their minds to figure out Pral Nerol’s research. Regardless of whether they can prove helpful or not, we will be back en route to Anthem as soon as we possibly can—so don’t go overboard.”

Hoff looked over at him. “What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean, Lord General. Hit surgically and hit hard, but nothing excessive. I want to show them a glimpse of our power, not break their civilization’s backbone. We’re here to save a race, not to destroy one. If time permitted, I wouldn’t make our presence known to their greater population at all. But this is an unfortunate situation, as time is a luxury we do not have. I’ve weighed the cost of their lives against my own people. Our cause is more dire, and so we must harden our hearts until we determine why Master Tolland sent us here. At the very least, your display hopefully will rouse the passenger of the
Traverser I
to come meet us. Whoever it is has been here for four years. Pral Nerol’s researcher will know much about the people down there. He or she might be able to provide some insight into Master Tolland’s intentions.”