The Theron Residency (Brides of Theron Book 4) (18 page)

Lars rarely found himself in this position. If he weren't secured to this seat right now, he would have moved to kick this guy’s ass. But seeing his situation as it was, it would probably be in his best interest to keep his mouth shut. He felt the barrel of the gun nudge him more forcefully this time. “I said, do you understand?” Molleb’s shouted in Lars’ face. The color was edging up past his collar. Whatever Lars was doing was pissing him off pretty bad. Lars was determined not to give him the satisfaction and avoided Molleb’s gaze. “I see how you want to play this. You better learn something real fast. You will do what I say, or I will break you. Mark my words, prisoner. I will break you and there will be no one around to save you.” He walked around the chair giving him another shot to the back of the head. This time though, everything went black.

He did not know just how long he had been out. The jostling of chair and the voices of the guards brought him back to awareness. He opened his eye and looked around. He was being pushed toward a large metal door on the side of a mountain. There was a parking lot behind him and six guards surrounding him. Molleb was leading the pack at the moment. When they reached the door, Molleb put his eye up to a scanner and the doors parted open with the sound of metal rolling on ball bearings. The heat from within flooded through the crack of the door into his face. They pushed him past the threshold. All he could see around him was the dim lights cast from the bulbs suspended on wires above his head and the brown of the soil and dirt that lined the walls.

“Well, well, well Molleb. Who do we have here?” said a guard through a speaker. He was in a glassed in room with dozens of screens showing images from deeper in the prison. He looked at one of the monitors and saw an old man cowering in the corner of the cell with shaky hands clutching at his head. I guess that was what Molleb meant by breaking him. Would he end up that way over time?

“I brought the Theron Traitor, Lars. Do you have his suite ready Bochan?” Molleb said and the other guards laughed.

“I sure do,” he started typing on a keypad then dragged his finger across it. The image of a cell was displayed before him across four of the screens. Different angles of the same cell lined the wall. Past the bars was a simple cot. In the corner was a hole in the ground that he assumed was used for going to the bathroom. There were no windows, only walls of rock and bars. He looked at the glass in front of him, where several guards gathered to get a look at him. Condensation formed around the edges of the glass where it met the metal frame. It must have been air conditioned in that room. It was so hot here near the opening that he began to wonder how many prisoners had died from mere heat exposure.

“Aww. Did Gek die? That was his cell, wasn’t it?” Krunt said.

“Yeah. The poor bastard bit it last night. Don’t you worry Lars, we got it all cleaned up and ready for you.” Bochan said with a chuckle.

Lars was pushed down a series of dimly lit tunnels until he came to the door of his cell. Molleb took an injection gun and placed it to the side of Lars's neck and pulled the trigger. Seconds later Lars was fully aware of where he was and what was going on around him but his ability to move or speak were inhibited. The guards unfastened him from the chair and lifted him up. They pulled the chair out from under him and let him go. He fell hard to the ground and watched their feet as they left his cell pulling the heavy iron door closed behind them.

“Welcome to your new home,” someone said. He heard the bang of the door as it shut and locked and the sound of the cameras panning around the room. He laid on the hot, rock floor helpless tasting blood in his mouth for several minutes until he started to feel his face, then his arms, and finally his legs. He pushed himself up off the floor and crawled over to the cot. It took him a few minutes to climb into it.

Facing the wall, he felt the tears trickle down his cheek. He cried as soundlessly as he could and tried to appear like he was sleeping. Crying wasn’t something that was natural to him. It shocked him to the core that tears were falling in the first place. Today, he would allow himself to breakdown. After all, he had been through so much. But, tomorrow and after that, they would find that they could never break him.

HHHe

After meeting with Gatton and Uphir, Carel went back to the barracks reserved for the prison guards who lived in homes far from the prison. Here they enjoyed the amenities of a rec-room, shower, mess-hall, and bed. Staying in the barracks seemed like a better alternative to driving the three hours to get to his apartment on the other side of the planet in the city of Haierti. Haierti was the second largest city on Drylon and once was the business mecca of the planet. Along the outskirts of the city used to be the factory district that supplied manufactured goods to the people of this world. Many of the manufacturers had to shut their doors when Gatton declared himself emperor because they unable to move much of their merchandise to other worlds. This was where the underground movement to eliminate Gatton was growing by leaps and bounds. The Drylon people were sick of being unable to trade with other nearby systems. The warehouses were full of products and nonperishable goods with absolutely no hope of profit or exchange.

He emptied the contents of his foot locker into his large sack and pulled the drawstring tight. This trip would be miserable knowing the Jenaya might be subject to suffer without his protection. The thought not seeing her every day was almost too hard to bear. Over the last couple of days, they had grown to trust in one another. “God, may she be safe while I’m gone,” he whispered to himself. He walked out to the waiting area for the transport vehicle that would take him to the palace parking lot where his car was parked.

Gabe and Benton were sitting on the benches in the waiting area of the transport depot talking to each other when Carel came around the corner. Gabe looked up to him and smiled, “So, you’re still alive Fenwick. I guess that makes you the new boss of us, huh?”

“I guess I’ll be your boss when I get back.” Carel chuckled.

“So, what was it like meeting face to face with the Emperor? I have never had the honor of meeting him myself.” Benton said.

“It was alright I guess. I think he is as confident as I am that the prisoners are dead.” Carel busied himself with retying the lace on his boot. That way he wouldn’t have to look them in the face when he told them boldfaced lies.

“I heard he has the creepiest eyes. Someone once told me that they’re as black as his soul.” Benton said.

“Be careful what you say man. If the wrong person overheard what you said, you could be executed.” Gabe gave Benton a harsh look and turned toward Carel as if to plead with his eyes that Benton didn’t mean what he said.

“Look, I’m the last guy that will go to Gatton and rattle off tales about what people say about him behind his back. Especially you guys. People tend to always talk shit about the man in charge. Soon, there will be guards talking about me behind my back.” Carel said. He looked at his watch. “Transport is running late, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s a bit late today,” Gabe said. “So Fenwick, what are you going to do the next couple of days?”

“I think I am going to sleep. Several guys in my room snore so loud, I haven’t been able to sleep since I got here,” he chuckled. “Hopefully, I will be assigned a room to myself when I get back.”

“Hey, we’re in your room,” Benton said looking offended.

“Yeah, but you don’t hear yourselves when you sleep. You guys aren’t that bad, Tordor snores so loud that I swear I can feel my bed vibrate,” Carel said.

“You’re right about that. I guess we got used to it.” Gabe laughed as he looked off into the distance. He stood up and picked up his bag. “Boys, it looks like our ride is here.”

Carel found a seat, lowered his chin to his chest and closed his eyes. He wasn’t really sleeping, just thinking. He just wanted Gabe and Benton not to feel the need to talk to him. He rarely had a moment to himself when he was in the barracks and around the camp. He tried to have his superior assign him to work opposite shifts from his roommates so that he could sleep, but that didn’t always work. Each room in the barracks had four beds, each with a personal footlocker at the end of each bed. His roommates were nice and despite the small space respected each other’s privacy. That was all that mattered.

He planned out in his head what he was going to do when he got to Haierti. First, he was dying to see if Zirlo made it out safely. Waiting the last few days with no knowledge of what was going on was torture. He would send a message to his parents as soon as possible, who in turn would keep him up to speed on all developments. It was getting so close to the end now. Soon, the decision would be made to rescue these people. Mattie weighed heavy on his heart. He prayed that she would make it home to see her son that Jenaya talked about. Jenaya. His thoughts of late seemed always to go back to her.

Gabe shook him by his shoulder when they were in the parking lot. He shuddered like he was roused to wake and stretched making the guards believe he was sleeping. They said their goodbyes and he walked over to his hovercraft. He threw his bag in the back, buckled his harness and punched in the coordinates Three hours from now he would know where the rebellion stood.



Uphir came to him when Gatton had returned from the prison camp. He told him that he had a special job for him. Frenier had been waiting in the lot for hours coming up with different ways to ensure that he wouldn’t fall asleep on the job. If he screwed this up, Gatton would surely kill him. It was really boring to wait around like this. He was assigned to follow Carel Fenwick everywhere he went over the next three days. When Carel was in route to return to the prison camp, he was to notify Uphir immediately. What the hell did Fenwick do to arouse Gatton’s suspicion? He knew little about him, met him once or twice, and it seemed that he was a pretty stand up kind of guy.

When he arrived on the lot, he tagged Carel’s car with a tracking device given to him by Uphir. He watched Carel leave the transport vehicle, say something to two fellow guards, and walk to his hovercraft. When he took off, Frenier punched in a code to follow the tracking signal. When he hit enter, the device went berserk. “Damn, that wasn’t supposed to happen. It must be faulty. Guess we are going to have to do this the old fashioned way,” he said to himself. His eyes glued on the craft before him he ducked in and out behind other cars, trees, and obstructions trying to keep Carel unaware that he was being followed.



Soon after Carel lifted off the parking lot, he flipped on the signal jammer and heard a loud beep from the console followed by a message from the computer speaker, “Tracking device detected. Shall I disable it?” He hit the enter button and heard a loud pop. It was a good thing that Rog installed the signal jammer. Now, he was going to have to figure out who was tailing him. He looked over his shoulder and saw a craft that was operating erratically. He activated the camera on the back of the car and targeted the craft following him. A blurry picture came up on the screen. He snapped a few more until he got a clear enough picture of a man’s face. He recognized the man following him at once after the computer cleaned up the image. It was the chamber guard stationed in front of Gatton’s room this morning.

“It might take longer than I thought to get home,” he said to himself with disappointment. He typed swiftly on the keyboard to have the computer track the movements of man on his tail. He let Gatton’s guard follow him easily for the first ten minutes or so as he traveled in the opposite direction of his destination. Every once in a while he would bank hard to the left or right. Then he ascended to a higher altitude to safely jump into hyper drive then quickly descend to duck into the cover of the trees. He would stay in the trees for a while cloaked by the branches searching out in all directions around him with the gadgets that Rog Gizzeppli installed in his car during his last visit. After about an hour of playing duck and chase, he saw no signs of the man tailing him.

He stopped to think and sent a message to Rog. “Meet me at location #3.” Rog’s family owned several houses and apartments on Drylon that were cared for by resistance members who were employed as caretakers. Location #3 was a warehouse located well outside the city limits that Rog’s wife inherited from her parents. It served as his home base now that support for the rebellion was growing. This was where Rog would invent all kinds of devices that would keep him and the others safe. Some of Rog’s gadgets made Carel feel like a super spy at times. It was possible that Rog had already saved his life already today with his signal jammer. Another quick check showed no other vehicles in his vicinity. Carel plugged in the destination coordinates and settled in for a long ride.

“What do you mean, you lost him?” Uphir yelled.

“Either the tracking device you gave me was faulty or he was prepared for it. It went crazy the moment I enabled it. I tailed him as long as I could. I can’t be entirely sure, but I think he knew he was being followed and it seemed as if he was trying hard to evade me. I was just outmaneuvered in the end.” Frenier shook his head and looked at the floor. His posture showed that he was afraid of what was to come.

“I wonder what the man is hiding.” Uphir started to pace the floors in front of the big red desk in his brother’s office. “You’re lucky that I am the one that you broke this news with. If Gatton were here, he would have shot you right between the eyes.”

“I did my best, Sir.” Frenier pleaded.

Uphir looked over to him angrily. What would he tell his brother? Should he tell him at all? Frenier losing Carel would make Gatton furious. He thought for a moment with his chin between thumb and forefinger. He looked up when a thought struck him, “Maybe there is a way to redeem yourself. I want you in the parking lot awaiting his return. As soon as he checks in I want you to notify me immediately. If you fail this time Frenier, I will kill you myself. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” He snapped his body to attention and clicked his heels.

“Dismissed.” Uphir turned his back to Frenier waiting to hear the door click behind him. “Damn it!” he yelled and threw the nearest item on the desk at the wall watching it shatter into a million pieces. Gatton would be really mad. Even he was never spared Gatton’s violent nature. He had been his brothers punching all his life. It got worse after his mother had died.

Many years ago, his father Bezaliel had hidden them away to protect them from the flood…

Bezaliel was once the ‘shadow of God’, doing God’s bidding to create and maintain the universe. He would find distant solar systems with planets suitable for life and farm them to the description of the Most High. He was the 13
th
Watcher of the 20 leaders of the fallen angels listed in the Book of Enoch. He fell in love with a human woman named Azaria. She was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and farmer on the planet called Shan, it would be known among those who populated it later as Earth. His mother was so beautiful. She had skin so fair with long ebony locks that curled in perfect ringlets. Her eyes were so brightly green and blue that they appeared to glow when she smiled. His brother’s evil ways seemed to be muted when his mother was alive. She was the only one who could calm him when he became enraged if only to keep her youngest son safe.

Bezaliel was ordered by The Most High to gather the water from the planet Mars into a large storehouse or spaceship. This water was intended to be dumped on the earth to cleanse the planet from the wickedness created when the angels started to take wives from the daughters of man. Bezaliel had been pretty successful at keeping his wife and children a secret. Once he heard God’s plan to kill everything on earth, he took his family and hid them far away on the nearest planet suitable for their physical bodies. He took them to a cave on the planet two solar systems over and promised to return for them once he finished the task God had given him. They waited for many days patiently, but he never returned.

Days became weeks and his mother, unable to live without her angel, wasted away slowly. They realized after waiting for several weeks that they couldn’t remain in the cave. The animals they were hunting for food were few in number and they did not know what plants were edible or poisonous. Azaria ordered them to leave the cave and seek out a settlement or city in which they could live. After days of walking, they found a civilization of primitive beings. These beings had leathery, scaly skin of azure blue. They had black beaked noses and surprisingly similarly colored eyes as his mother. When they saw his mother approach, they dropped down to their knees and began to worship her. The three of them lived among them like royalty with every one of their needs met for an extended time.

When their mother died of old age, Gatton decided to take her place. It wasn’t long before he was unjustly killing the people who had taken care of them for so long. When the natives didn’t do exactly as he wished, he would murder them and set their corpses before the others as an example. Sometimes the bodies of the people he killed would remain on stakes outside his hut for days before he would allow them to be removed for burial. The smell didn’t seem to bother Gatton much. The practice of killing innocents and letting them rot bothered Uphir because he was as compassionate as his mother once was. These people loved his mother, for this reason. It was when Uphir tried to step in on behalf of the native people, Gatton beat him so badly that he killed him. In Uphir’s death, they found out what they truly were.

Uphir’s spirit lifted out of his body and floated invisibly above it. He no longer felt the pain that surged through his beaten body just a few moments ago. He looked down and saw his face with puffy and bruised eyes closed. His body was still and lifeless. There was crimson blood coating the skin where his skull was bashed in with a rock. He watched as his brother, realizing what he had done, grabbed his still body and shook it to try to revive him. It was the first time he had ever seen Gatton cry. Gatton cradled his body in his arms like an infant child. “Please, I am so sorry. Don’t leave me Uphir!” His brother shouted out. He stayed there looking down from above. He was free floating and thinking that maybe he would find his mother in heaven, where ever that was. His father had always told them that places called heaven and hell existed, and if they were good they would find heaven when they died. Even his father’s God and creator could not be so cruel as to destroy a creature made from the love of beings that he had a hand in creating.

When he became tired of watching his brother mourn, he sought out the one true friend he had. If he had been suitably equipped, he probably would have married her. Their bodies were incompatible and made a union impossible. He found her distraught after learning of his death and it broke his heart. He swooped down to comfort her and that’s when it happened. He fell into her body and got stuck there. All of a sudden all of the emotions that she ever had experienced, every memory she held, flashed into his mind. Everything that made her who she was, became a part of him. He felt her gentleness and the qualities that he admired most about her sink into his consciousness and take root there. When he went to move his hand, hers moved. Her body reacted to his impulses. He studied the hand before him clenching and releasing his fist. This couldn’t be…

He went quickly to the water basin on the washstand and looked at his reflection on the surface of the still water. The girl that he went to comfort was not there anymore. The bright eyes he loved to look into were now changed. They were replaced with the large dark black irises that he and his brother shared. He pushed the table away with her hands and the metal bowl crashed down on the floor spilling water over her feet, now his feet. What had he done?

Not knowing what to do or how to handle this, he ran as quickly as he could to his brother. His brother would figure out what to do. When he got there, his brother was holding his former dead body close to his chest while still crying out. The native people were surrounding him now. The parents of his host’s body looked upon their daughter. When they saw her eyes, they looked at each other in horror. They approached him as he stood there in her body, seeing them with his eyes. He watched the girl’s father raised his hand and slap him hard across her face.

“Demon!” he yelled out in his native tongue. The others soon followed. They all began to chant, “Demon!”

Gatton looked up at him and their eyes met. He must have immediately seen his brother behind those eyes. He dropped the lifeless body that once contained him and went to stand before him in Leela’s body.

Over his shoulder, he asked, “What is going on?”

In her voice, he heard himself say, “I don’t know. I went to comfort her and I sort of…Stepped into her. Now, I can’t step out. I am stuck in here.”

“Uphir, I killed you! That is impossible!” Gatton said as he slowly stepped away from the angry crowd that was beginning to amass in front of them.

“You don’t think that I already know that!” Uphir watched over his brother’s shoulder as the crowd started to close in on them. “This isn’t good brother. What should we do?”

“Run!” Gatton yelled. Uphir and Gatton ran as fast as they could into the wilderness, to the cave where their father left them to hide and took refuge there for a while. Both of them sat in the cave for days just trying to understand what happened. Uphir told his brother everything that occurred when he fell into her body. How her memories and thoughts became his. He could still hear Leela’s voice in the back of his mind screaming at the top of her awareness for him to get out of her body. She wanted her body back. She cried, repeating that she wanted to go home. She wanted to live and return to her family. It took some time, but he finally figured out how to quiet her thoughts. It took determination to close her off so that he couldn’t hear her speak to him anymore.

Many days later they ventured out of the cave and walked further away from the home that they once knew. They walked and camped out for weeks to months losing track of days as they crossed the expansive forest eventually coming to an ocean. Near the beach, they found a spacecraft with a ramp left down. It was a craft similar to the one that his father used to bring them here. Several people were wandering around the ship sifting through the sand and collecting plants and other living creatures carefully putting them into pots and cages.

Gatton pulled Uphir over to him and said, “I have an idea. You need to kill me.” He placed the hilt of a knife in Uphir’s hand positioned the tip of the blade to rest on his chest just under his sternum.

“Brother, we have no idea how this works. Even if I kill you, we don’t know the first thing about how to fly that craft.”

“Uphir, we can continue walking around for eons waiting to die here or we can take this chance. You said yourself that all of Leela’s memories became yours, right? We have to take a chance brother. We have to get off this planet.” When Uphir’s azure hands went limp, Gatton helped push the tip of the knife further into his chest himself to help him get started. Uphir saw the blood as it began to pool around the tip of the blade.

Uphir took a deep breath with hands shaking and tried to push the blade in further. He shook his head and said, “I can’t do it. I just can’t do it.” He cried with tears blurring his vision.

Gatton looked directly into his brother’s eyes with disgust. “This is why I killed you. You are weak brother. I am ashamed that I am even related to you. You make me sick.”

Uphir felt the heat of his hate rise and a blank look settle across his face. He took the handle of the blade in hand, placing his other hand at the base. Swiftly, he shoved the knife upwards until he could feel the contractions of Gatton’s heart pulsing through the hilt. He caught Gatton as he started to collapse to the ground and sat his body up against the nearest tree. Gatton whispered triumphantly, “I knew I could make you do it.”

Uphir knew he had been played. He pulled the knife from his brother’s chest. His blue hands were shaking violently, covered with his brother’s dark red blood. He dropped the knife at his feet, wanting to distance himself from the death that it brought. Gatton’s spirit left the body on the ground. Uphir watched in bewilderment as his brother’s eyes changed from the large searing blackness they once were, to the same bright green-blue that he remembered from his mother. This sparked the memory of his mother. He remembered her tenderness and wondered, but mostly doubted, that any of that compassion existed in his brother.

He grasped onto the nearest tree to keep him standing. He felt the sickness build and he vomited until nothing was left but dry heaves. When he became aware of his surrounding again, he heard the sound of fighting in the distance. He abandoned his brother’s body and looked out to where the ship was parked. A pulsar gun fired several times and there were three dead men on the beach. He heard someone yell out his name, “Uphir, we’ve done it. Now, let’s get out of here!” The man laughed loudly as he walked up the ramp of the ship. Uphir took one last look at the body that had his mother’s eyes, and then joined his brother on the ship.

“You were right! I have all of this guy’s memories and I know exactly how to fly this ship. This is remarkable!” Gatton said as he pushed Uphir’s body into one of the seats and buckled the harness. “Why are you so glum brother? We are finally going to get off this planet. As soon as we get a chance, we are going to get you a better body. One that isn’t crying and overcome with emotion all the time. Brother, from this point forward, I forbid you from ever entering the body of a woman when you die.” He laughed loudly.

He pressed a number of lit buttons on the console after he strapped himself in and Uphir felt the ship shoot up through the atmosphere and into the darkness of space. As soon as they docked with the mothership they acted like they were bringing Leela to the ship’s Hospital bay. Gatton then killed Uphir in the medical ward and Uphir took that opportunity to move into a male Doctor’s body. Everything that the doctor had ever seen or experienced started flooding into him all at once. It was such a rush to gain intelligence in an instant. He was glad that he didn’t have to look at Leela’s face or bloodied hands anymore. Using the doctor’s memories, Uphir brought Gatton near the bridge and killed him. As the crew carried on with their duties, Gatton’s spirit floated out and inhabited the captain of the ship. That was just the beginning of how their lives would change and evolve. So many memories, so many lifetimes.