The Source: Book III of the Holding Kate Series (9 page)

Rolling to a stop beside the Staying Well, they gawked at the chaos. It looked like a war zone. Smoke billowed from the windows of the Administration Mansion, and dead giant insect carcasses littered the ground. They didn’t seem as scary in the rising sun as they did in pitch black the last time Corey encountered them. But still, giant insects!

Spheres popped in and out, leaving the impression that the sky was polka dotted and raining sand. Some spheres materialized then fizzled out before they delivered anything.

Eunavae yelled in Ampelese. “Brashtor, Drayse, with me!” They charged into the cornfield maze after some scampering scorpion monsters.

“Kate, stay close. I don’t trust this.” Corey took her arm and led her to the porch of the Mansion and peered through a window.

Donnie and Mel ran up behind them with Krenne and Manifus. “Is everyone out?” Donnie cried.

“We need to check upstairs!” Corey glanced at Kate and the two pregnant women. “Kate, take Mel and Krenne and set up a first aid station in the Doc’s office.”

To Krenne and Mel he spoke in Ampelese. “Guard my wife. She is most likely the target of all of this. I will be right there.”

Krenne nodded and took Kate by the arm. Mel led them to the Doc’s office in the heart of the village.

Donnie and Manifus had already entered the burning building. Corey followed them in with sword drawn. He broke the glass on the fire hose and dragged it into the tea room and began spraying the base of the flames near the oven. It appeared someone had flipped the gas on and tossed something flammable into the kitchen. An explosion circumference radiated from the stove.

That disturbed him. It indicated intelligence. He didn’t think the zombies would be responsible, definitely not the insects, maybe the dragons.

Smoke billowed through the shattered windows, but there were no more flames. He called up the stairs to Donnie. “Fire is out! All clear.”

“Got it!” he called back down.

Corey shut off the hose and pushed through the door to Mama Ty’s office to make sure it was empty. His attention was drawn to the painting over her desk of three beautiful women and a small child. The tall blonde woman in the picture was Starlythe, the leader of the Cheleuthi band. His eyes lingered on the young child with spirals of red curls. That would be his great-great-grandmother, Shanna Wisenberg Wilson. She had been known as Tsian the Wise.

Corey had looked at that painting many times and never realized its significance. It must have been commissioned by his great-great-grandmother on her return from her quantum jump to Ampeliagia.
Just how intricately are the two worlds connected?

Another loud gong sounded outside. Corey ran to the porch and started down the steps when another sphere dropped right in front of him. He skidded to a stop and leapt back to see what horrors would emerge. The swirling glass shards fell to the ground and he let out a shout. The enormous hairy body of a giant Cyclops towered, gazing down at him with his beady eye. Mucus drooled from every orifice and the stench of dead cattle assaulted the air.

“Ho! Need some help here!”

Donnie and Manifus ran down the steps, skidding to a halt beside Corey. Their eyes took the same trip up and they stood gawping at the giant. He blinked his hideous eye, appearing confused. He panned down and roared.

“Kate! You Kate?” He grabbed a young girl who ran from a giant wasp and held her up to his eye. She screamed hysterically. “You no Kate!” He tossed her aside and the boys scrambled to catch her.

The wasp attacked the giant and he yelped and swung at the insect with his bulbous club.

The boys ducked the frenetic slashing of the club until the Cyclops stomped off in pursuit of the fleeing wasp.

Corey’s heart sank. Mattovdzky was sending creatures after Kate. He glanced toward the Doc’s office and shouted for the second time in as many minutes. “NO!”

A deluge of zombie creatures had closed in on the Doc’s office and were trying to get through the doors. Corey sprinted toward the center of the village with Donnie and Manifus close behind. They hacked through the press of partially decomposed bodies and found Eunavae and Drayse fighting from the other side.

Rotted corpses littered the walkway and severed limbs scampered around searching for their bodies. A hand grabbed Corey’s leg and started climbing up his pants. He scooped it off with his sword and grimaced in disgust.

“Zombies?” Eunavae cried. “Seriously? Is he plundering all of our prior jumps?” She swiped the head off the last one and kicked the body away.

They paused and panned the site in shock, stunned at the massacre all around. In the distance Tara, Trip, Starlythe and Staid clashed with an enormous dragon, with scales of burnt ebony and piercing bellows to melt a stout heart. Brashtor had just joined the fray and loosed his spear into the dragon’s screaming maw.

Kate opened the door of the Doc’s office and stepped out in trepidation. “Ugh! What is that smell?” She clamped her hand over her nose.

“Kate, stay inside, they want you, specifically!”

“Kate?” The Cyclop’s voice rumbled and the cover over the walkway peeled back like the lid on a Tupperware bowl, revealing the giant brute. “Kate!” He reached for her and seven swords came to bear on the monster.

He jerked his bleeding hand back, and Corey shoved Kate inside and slammed the door behind them. He dragged her through the first aid station to the back door and hurried her away from the building. They glanced back to see the Cyclops stumble and fall into the structure. It crumbled around him in a heap of debris and dust.

I have to get Kate out of here! I have to get her somewhere safe
. A giant scorpion dropped out of a tree in front of them. Kate snapped her whip at it to distract it while Corey circled around and stabbed it in the head from behind.

They ran. Candol and Stealthlin jogged around the apothecary building to the left and fell into step alongside Kate.

“Where are we going?” Stealthlin asked.

“I have to get Kate to safety.”

“They are targeting her?” Candol asked.

“Yes. In here.” Corey yanked open the back door of the Chapel and they filed in. He glanced around to see if they were being watched but saw nothing in the area.

They passed through Chaps’ living quarters and into a hallway. “Down here.” Corey led them into the basement and pressed Kate down into a chair in the center of the room.

Candol, Stealthlin and Corey each took a window and scanned the perimeter. Corey had a view of the black dragon. He wasn’t doing so well, it would only be a matter of moments before the warriors would finish him off.

“The one-eyed giant is down for good,” Stealthlin reported from his viewpoint.

“Clear,” Candol answered from hers.

They all heaved a sigh of relief and Kate shuddered, wrapping her arms around her middle. She looked up at Corey with eyes full of dread.

“I am going to get you out of here, Kate. We’ll go where he can’t find us.”

She nodded and placed her head in her hands, elbows to knees, and stared at the floor, trying to catch her breath. Her whole frame trembled.

Corey heard a strangled noise and whipped around to the closet behind him. Stealthlin heard it too and they approached the closet carefully. Taking up a perch on either side of the doors, they exchanged a nod, and gave a silent count then whipped the doors open.

Five jumpers screamed in fright and cowered under their arms.

“It’s okay. Hey, we’re friends,” Corey said. They slowly emerged from their hiding place and gaped around the room with wild eyes full of panic.

The smallest one breathed “zombies” over and over with horror sketched across her face.

Kate jumped up and ran to them, crooning in their ears and stroking their hair gently. “It’s okay. You are safe here with us. Don’t worry.”

Two of the smaller girls clamped around her waist with vice grips and cried into her shirt. She walked them to a table and eased them into chairs.

The door banged open and they all screamed hysterically. Chaps ran into the room with an axe in his hands. “Corey! What? Are you hiding?”

“We’re guarding Kate,” he corrected. “They’re all targeting her.”

He glanced at Kate and the Cheleuthi warriors, then at the children. “Well, then, I’d better rustle these little ‘uns outta here.” He pointed at the kids.

Corey nodded. “You don’t want them near here,” he agreed.

He herded them all together. “Corey, Mama Ty is coming out of the Inner Circle soon. I thought you might wanna know. The board decided to recall her before the year is up.”

“Good, Chaps. But I don’t plan to be here when she gets back. I am taking Kate away as soon as possible.”

He searched Corey’s eyes, then nodded and turned to gather the children to himself.

“Chaps,” Corey called. Chaps turned back with eyebrows raised in question. “I took care of the things we talked about. Thanks for caring and… you know…”

He glanced at Kate again, gave a tip of his cowboy hat. “Y’all be careful, now. Make it official, ya hear?” He smiled and led the quaking children from the basement.

THE SCREAMS OF
panicked campers and monstrous invaders slowly died down, and an eerie silence fell over the village. Corey watched as the last of the dragons fell from the sky, digging a trench in the soccer field twenty feet long. A well-thrown spear, buried deep in his heart, quivered with his last shuddering breath.

“Come on,” Corey said to Kate and the warriors in both English and Ampelese.

He took Kate’s hand and they threaded through the hallway and pushed through a back metal door. The boiler room creaked and groaned as pipes snaked their way to the understructure of the chapel. He led Kate and the Cheleuthi warriors to an access panel in the far corner.

He picked up a crowbar leaning against the corner, slipped it beneath the metal plate, and pried it open.

“Corey, what is this?” Kate asked.

“Underground tunnel back to First Cabin. I found it on the schematics yesterday when I talked to Wallace.” He held the plate as they crawled through the access panel, then secured it back into place. They stooped low for the first few yards before standing upright as the tunnel widened.

The tunnel stretched far into the darkness. Corey pulled flashlights out of the backpacks, handed one to Stealthlin and showed him how to use it. He seemed a bit shocked by the fireless torch, but grinned and flicked the switch several times as he brought up the rear.

They moved quickly through the tunnel, occasionally slowed by a junction where they had to clamber over and around some pipes. Drips and pipe song accompanied their footsteps as they hurried through the dank corridor. They stopped short at a large metal door barring passage. It had a swipe pad on the side and no doorknob.

“Corey, that looks like the same kind of entry pad that the Inner Circle facility had.”

When Dirk, Mel, Donnie, Trip, Tara, Kate and Corey became the Keepers, they were blindfolded and taken away to an underground facility for three weeks of intense training. They prepared for the investigation of the Inner Circle, the twelve scientists who formed a collective hive of creative intelligence to run the Quantum Jumps. They were given the highest security clearance but kept secluded in the underground facility.