At the End - a post-apocalyptic novel (The Road to Extinction, Book 1) (23 page)

My legs kicked in a flutter as I gripped the
ledge. Penelope found my feet, calmed them, and helped me down. My
teeth instantly chattered, my skin bit by the extreme cold. “This
is insane,” I reminded her.

“Maybe. Look for a door, we’re not getting
back up to the panel.” We groped around for a door handle. Nothing.
The blue mist swirled about, as if frolicking.

I bumped into something hard, hard enough to
bruise my shoulder. Jerking back, I raised my gun, primed. The mist
cleared the closer we walked to the center of the room. Large
chunks of red and white hung from the ceiling. Long stringy fibers
as solid as rock stared back at us.

“It’s a cow,” Penelope gasped. The
cow-shaped meat was perfect, almost as if it had been pristinely
skinned. Behind the butchered carcass of the cow, more hung in a
row that went far on out of sight. We walked on and another animal
dangled beside the cow. The big slab of icy meat matched a horse,
and next to it, an elk. Animal after animal appeared, all
different, and behind each one were thousands more of the same
species. We passed elephants, dogs, turkeys, rats, deer, bears,
bison, lizards, fish, whales, alligators, kangaroos, rhinoceros,
goats, rabbits, toads, and walruses, and hundreds of other animals.
The ceiling shaped to each one, as high as needed for the largest,
and for the small animals the ceiling spanned the same height as
where we had entered down from the panel.

It felt as though we walked for hours, and
we gasped at each new species, surprised to see the red muscle that
existed beneath the skin. Then at last I could see the end: a shape
dwelled there that horrified my eyes and churned my stomach in
revulsion.

Penelope stopped, gaping at the human
hanging like all the rest of the animals. Skinned just the same,
with frozen muscle and fat exposed, yet it was different to gaze
upon our own kind, so much worse, the butchery seemed. But in the
end, the alions gave us no special treatment. We were animals just
the same as all the rest.

Dizzy, I fell back on my butt, then rolled
over, facing the wall.

Shivering, Penelope stepped away, her back
against the wall, allowing the blue mist to hide the suspended
corpses. She slid down and sat next to me.

“Now we know,” she whispered. She grabbed
her knees and shook in the cold.

Nauseated, I couldn’t see straight, and my
mind worked in scrambled flashes. Incoherent thoughts popped in and
out, as if I had lost control, melted in a freezer.

Then I noticed my arm lifted up, and my body
glided across the slick floor. A pressurized door opened. Warmth
invaded my skin, lungs, and blood. The blue faded. I peered up and
saw Penelope with unclouded vision. The fuzziness that had attacked
my head vanished.

“You all right, dude?” she asked me.

I shook my head. “No, are you?”

“No,” she choked on the word, then cleared
her throat. “No, I’m not either.” She flopped down beside me.

I rolled over and sat. “It’s so much worse
to know . . . to see it . . .” I mumbled.

She gave no reply as she stared at the tiled
floor.

I closed my eyes and dreamed of my parents.
Their faces were already hard to see clearly, distorted from the
terrible days and nights, and the traumatic events that never
seemed to stop. When I opened my eyes, I saw the giant room for the
first time, with rows upon rows stocked full of all the foods and
snacks that I most desired. My stomach bellowed a song of joy and
anticipation. My mouth watered and my eyes grew as wide as bowling
balls.

Skeptical, I blinked. All the food still sat
idle on hundreds of shelves, so I shut them again, counting to
five. I braced myself for the reality of my melted brain as I
opened them again. Yet, bags of tortilla chips and boxes of fig
bars awaited the return of my vision, speaking to my stomach as
much as my eyes. They pulled me toward them, as if they had shot a
grappling hook around my back and the rope retracted, drawing me
within a centimeter of their wrappings.

My outstretched arms grazed the box of fig
bars. “Penelope!” I yelled.

She jumped awake, instantly on her feet.
“Run,” she spoke to herself, now an automatic motivational
tool.

I smiled at her and tossed the box.

It slipped through her fingers as she tried
catching it with one hand. She rested her alion gun on the floor
and examined the box. “Fig bars?” she said, doubting her eyes.
Furiously, she tore the box apart, throwing the paperboard in all
directions. Six individually wrapped bars awaited her desperate
fingers. Once the wrapper was peeled, she bit into the fig bar,
realizing that she wasn’t dreaming. “It’s real!” she said with a
mouthful.

I snatched a bag of tortilla chips and
popped it open. Each chip was perfectly crunchy and salty. “If
we’re sharing the same dream, I may have to kill myself when we
wake,” I told her. I wouldn’t have been able to handle that
reality.

She studied the room with care. “It’s like a
hundred grocery stores.”

“Like a thousand grocery stores,” I said.
“The biggest stockpile that anyone could ever see. This must be
what they were after, our food supplies.”

“More like Earth’s food supplies,” she
corrected me. “Don’t forget what we saw in the other room.”

“That wasn’t a dream?” I stacked five chips
in my mouth at once, sucking them down like a vacuum hose sucking
up feathers.

“No, that wasn’t a dream.” She pointed to
the freezer door.

I stared at it for a while. I kept up pace,
crunching yellow triangle after yellow triangle. “I really wish it
had been.”

“Me too . . .” she replied. “Let’s see what
else we can find.” Tossing the fig remains aside, she walked off
along the wide aisle.

I followed close behind. We passed all the
chips I had ever known, and then some foreign chips of rice, corn,
pita, and more beyond naming. It was a different world of food. I
found a box of cheese fish and one of graham cracker bunnies. I ate
as we walked. My stomach was approaching maximum load, but I didn’t
want to stop, just in case this was my last meal.

We came upon a huge mountain of sport drinks
in a different row. They were unrefrigerated but appeasing. I drank
two or three one-liter bottles stamped with a foreign language. The
pink one was the best, I thought it was watermelon, but I was just
happy it was sweet.

Soon though, the liquid ran to my bladder.
“I have to pee,” I told Penelope.

She nodded. “I’ve been holding mine in for a
long time.”

“So have I, but the tank is bursting.” I was
shaking my hands to distract my mind from my bladder’s urgent
calls. “I’ve only gone twice since we’ve been here.”

She giggled. “Well you beat me, I’ve gone
three times. I’ll wait here for you.”

I half-grinned. “I won’t go far, just around
the corner.” I rushed around the corner of a shelf. Empty, I ambled
back. “Relief at last.”

“But now it’s my turn. Watch our stuff.” She
pointed to our pile of reserves, then walked around a different
corner. Returning, she smiled. “Ready to return to Earth?”

“Since I got here.” I trailed behind her
quick steps. The aisles were long and unending. At the end, I
glanced behind us. Quickly, I pushed Penelope out of the aisle,
behind a corner, jumping as I did.

“What is it?” she asked.

I peeked around the shelf. “Alion,” I
informed her of the peril. “It’s sniffing around where we peed like
it’s not invisible.”

“Dammit that was fast.” She bent low, poking
her head around the corner, just enough for her to glimpse the
alion as it sucked in long whiffs of our scent.

I trembled in fear. I knew it would find us
by its powerful nose. No matter how hard I shook, there was always
a trace of urine left after I went, a trace that would lead that
nose right to my crotch. “We have to run,” I whispered. “If it can
smell the urine on the floor, I bet it will be able to smell any
that might have leaked onto our clothes.”

She nodded. Without a reply, she turned and
sprinted off.

I huffed after her. Running was so much
worse on my lungs than crawling, and even that had nearly killed
me. Running now shot sharp pains through my gut, back, and sides,
not to mention my sore knees and aching feet. I doubled over a
couple of times, hunching as I continued on. Pain stabbed me
everywhere.

Quick footed, Penelope wound this way and
that way, dodging shelf corners, pivoting in a blink. I wondered if
she was a basketball player, but I didn’t have the breath to ask
her. She held open a door as I whirled around a shelf a few steps
behind.

The door pressurized as it closed. The room
was a long hallway filled with electronics. Using the yellow disk,
she opened the door to the left at the end of the hall. We entered
an empty square room. The walls were padded with a foam material,
as if to dampen collisions. A door across from us led to another
square room with a table covered in weapons. We brushed the weapons
aside and climbed on top of it. The ceiling was much taller, too
high for Penelope to reach, so I punched the first panel and up it
shot. I caught it with a hand and slid it to the side.

In a hurry and without thinking, I pulled
myself up first, stronger now than when worry had a grip on me.
Fear motivated me much more.

Before I could turn my body around, alions
burst into the room from three separate doors.

Penelope threw up the yellow disk, spun
around and started spraying black globes, until a blue orb broke on
her skin and enveloped her. Tiny, light blue tubes that resembled
little lightning flashes crept down from the edge of the ball,
drawing near her skin until they pierced her fragile body. She
didn’t move. She looked stuck in time.

I retreated and watched with only a fraction
of my eyes able to see.

A group of alions approached her. One
pressed a button on a bazooka weapon. The blue ball that
encapsulated Penelope vanished. An alion patted around her belt,
finding the decloak button. Her body now revealed, another alion
injected something into her elbow with the medical gun we had seen
earlier. Her eyes closed as her body collapsed.

A light growl burst forth from an alion, and
several looked up in my direction. I crawled back in a hurry. I
rolled over and put my feet to the duct floor, crouch-walking away.
I stopped, hesitant. I couldn’t just leave her behind. I went back
to the hole. All but one of the alions had disappeared. The alion
was sniffing every centimeter of the room, searching.

I cleared my throat, staring at the beast.
If I didn’t follow now, I wouldn’t ever find her. I undid my pants
and tossed my underwear aside with the hope that most of my scent
was concentrated on the article. My nerves twitching, I slipped
back down into the room, gun up and firing. One of the doors was
open, so I took a chance, wishing it were the correct one.

My wish came true. A dozen or so alions
surrounded Penelope’s body; one carried her over its furry
shoulder. None of them stopped to smell the air. If they could
smell me, they pretended not to.

I stayed back, lingering at a safer distance
than if I trailed at their heels. Their languid pace melted my
brain, and drove my nerves haywire. My blood zipped up and down my
arms and legs, swelling in my brain, then deserting the area in a
rush of blackness that threatened a loss of consciousness. Despite
my out of control body, I continued to follow, gun raised to their
hindquarters.

After what seemed like a hundred turns, they
finally stopped in a giant room; its walls were adorned with blue
slabs of reflective metal. Strapped to the slabs, a few people
struggled to get free, while others lay limp and lifeless. Three
tables lay in the center of the room where they secured Penelope. A
corpse rested on one of them, its chest open, a heart showing, and
when I passed, I saw it pump once with life.

The room spun. Swooning, I ran to the edge
of the room. I choked on air as I struggled to breathe. The air
turned to fire, and my vision left me, lying alone in the calm
darkness.

A second later, I rolled over, gasping. I
fought off the swirling shadows. At last, I won, staring at the
high dome ceiling of the alion room.

As I raised my upper body off the floor,
bending at the waist, I saw a yellow line flying at me. It looked
like a detection laser that protected museums and other high
security places. Not knowing what else to do, I jumped to my feet
and fled. The line stopped at the end of the door. It turned aside
and scanned along the walls.

Afraid, I turned back to regroup. None of my
thoughts were clear and I didn’t think I was doing Penelope any
favors as woozy as I was. I found a long hall with more pods, most
of them vacant.

I sat and collected my thoughts.

If the yellow line were a scanner, I
wouldn’t make it far enough into the room to free Penelope. I had
to disable it somehow. Several plans shot through my mind. I didn’t
think I could pull off a single one.

I got to my feet and wandered through a few
halls, memorizing the path back to the torture room, or whatever it
was. I entered into a massive room lined with rows of short tables,
no more than a few centimeters from the ground. Hundreds of alions
feasted. Not one peered my way, so I thought I was safe, still
invisible and without a strong scent.

I studied the alions. They ate at their
leisure, tearing meat from bone, some cooked, some raw. Along the
tables, bodies of birds, rabbits, deer, and humans overflowed,
bones tossed about, plucked clean of tissue.

Two of the nearest alions finished off the
flesh sticking to a long, thick bone. When all the meat sunk to the
pit of their stomachs, the bigger one stole the bone away and bit
at an edge, breaking apart the end. Holding the bone with a
humanlike hand, it swung back its head and sucked down the marrow
within, seeming to enjoy it as if it were candy.