Charged - Book One (19 page)

We sat staring silently at black screens, listening
to muffled metallic screams from above that reached twenty stories
down. I wondered if the others in the main hall could hear the
screeching. Then it grew quiet. Silence filled the room.

“How many did we get?”

“Twelve.”

“Collin said twenty-four total, right?”

“Twenty-four, but two of them seemed injured when
they crashed here,” Kye said.

“How many have you killed?” I said, looking at
Danel.

“Just the one that killed Richie.”

“So, best-case scenario,” Aaron said, “nine are
either going to try for the elevator shaft that is no longer
electrified or they are all digging beside it right now and two
injured ones waiting in the wings.”

There was twenty-five minutes until Station Ten
arrived and hopefully half an hour before the remaining creatures
could reach us. So there was approximately a five-minute leeway for
error, which I was sure was enough time to kill most of us.

WE COULD NOW HEAR the sound of metal scraping
against itself from above. We sat waiting for death or rescue.

“Do we know where they are?” I said.

“We won’t have a visual until they breach the main
garden room,” Danel answered, bringing up the screens to that
area.

No one seemed to be thinking. They were just more or
less reacting to the situation.

“There has to be something else we can do,” I
whispered.

Kye shook her head. She had clearly done all she
could do. She gave me a sad smile.

“The fountains,” Aaron
muttered.             

Danel looked at him, hoping for an idea.

“Can we close off the second garden room?” he
said.

“Yes.”

Kye brought up a blueprint on the main computer.

“This section has an emergency lockdown in case there
is a hull breach when the ship is in flight.”

“Can you access it from here?”

“Yes, but it won’t hold them for more than a couple
minutes.”

“How thick are the doors?”

“Ten inches, maybe less.”

“How fast do the doors come down?”

“Half a second.”

“The fountains… are they self-contained, or do they
connect to the main source?”

“Main supply; one hundred and fifty thousand gallons
that line the bottom of the ship that is continually recycled.
Why?” Kye said.

“We can drown them. You have at least twelve
fountains just in the main garden room. How much water can we pump
through them and how fast?”

“It would take half an hour just to fill the room,”
Danel said.

“We don’t even know if they can drown. We don’t know
if they have lungs,” Kye said.

“They can drown,” Danel said.

“Blow the pumps,” Aaron said. “Blow the fountains
right out of the floor.”

             
“What about the waterfall in the second garden?” I asked.

             
“It’s self-contained.” Danel said.

“WE HAVE A VISUAL,” Kye said, looking at the screen.
She quickly changed all of our screens to see what she was
seeing.

All eleven of them were present and none looked
injured. They were flying through the main garden room and their
bodies became almost entirely invisible, as if the hunt was on.
They glistened against the blue light, making their outer shells
look like broken pieces of mirrors strung together by some
undetectable source. They were moving so fast that the mirror
shards were only slightly disrupted, so I could only make out half
their forms. Had they not been moving, I don’t think I would’ve
seen them at all.

I couldn’t imagine anything worse than this. These
things came from Hell, from some unspeakable place. They flew right
into the alien trees unaffected and uprooted them. Some crashed
against the fountains, shattering them into tiny pieces. It was as
if they knew that their bodies would be unaffected.

Four were scaling across the walls and it was more
horrifying than I’d imaged. What I could make out from the shifting
mirrored images looked impossible to physically do. Their oversized
hooked arms flew out in front of them, stabbing the walls and their
legs came out from underneath their bodies in between the arms on
the inside. Their bodies looked bent in half with every leap, due
to their arms being twice the length of the legs. And the distance
obtained in this movement was unsurpassed by any human or animal
I’d ever seen. Every jarred leap they took had two seconds of glide
time from lift off to touch down: launch, glide, land and
repeat.

Kye’s eyes started to water as we watched. Aaron was
motionless. And Danel? Danel was completely composed, as if he were
the one doing all the watching in the last month. Or maybe I simply
couldn’t read his expression. I was hoping for the latter.

“I’ve never seen them move like this,” Kye said.

I know remembered that she saw everything differently
than me.

Danel didn’t reassure her. He simply looked at the
screen like he was watching something he’d seen a hundred
times.

“Don’t wait for all of them. Don’t wait too long!”
Aaron’s voice was panicked now. He was just starting to worry and I
could feel my body getting ready for fight mode. My mind started to
move faster; my blood was rushing into my muscles.

It would only be a moment now before they reached the
second garden room. Four of the ones in flight got there before the
others, moving at incredible speed. It was only a matter of seconds
for them to get halfway into the second garden room.

“Now, Kye!” Danel ordered.

With trembling hands, she hit two buttons on the
touch screen in the table in front. And nothing happened.

“Now, Kye!” Danel yelled.

“I did!” Kye’s voice was now trembling.

“Oh, God!” slipped from my lips. The doors didn’t
close.

Danel now pushed Kye out of the way and hit the keys
himself and still nothing happened. Tension and sweat and breath
filled the room. One of the creatures that was in flight landed in
the doorway of the second garden and seemed to look around with its
eyeless head. It was looking for us, trying to sense us. It would
only be a moment before all of them were through both gardens and
on their way.

“Damn!” Danel’s composure was completely gone.

“They haven’t been used in five thousand years,” Kye
was trying to explain.

Danel hit two other keys and the floor shook as the
door came down. It was faster than my own human eyes could see,
slicing one creature in half just as four more creatures reached
it. They stopped, looking at the remains of the creature that was
crushed and began to claw at the doors. The creature severed by the
door was still moving. Half its body was in the garden room and the
other half was now dragging itself slowly in our direction.

Quickly, Kye blew the pumps by increasing the
pressure in the storage tanks that lined the ship. The remaining
fountains exploded into pieces almost simultaneously. The sound was
deafening, like large booms from fireworks, one after the other
separated by only fractions of a second. Some of the creatures were
struck by a few large pieces of the fountains, but they were
unaffected.

We watched as the first four stopped clawing the door
and turned their heads towards the sound and debris that had hit
them. During those three seconds, the rooms were already
twenty-five percent full. At water level, they were not reflective
at all. The orange and pink elements of the water didn’t blend
together, but resembled oil and water: one being much lighter than
the other, but you could still see through it.

The creatures slowly started to change in appearance.
The parts of their bodies that touched the water were black and
looked like hard shiny metal. We watched as half went back to the
main entrance, only to see that both doors had come down. As they
clawed their way back, I had to catch my breath, because the parts
of them that were in the water were visible, but the parts of them
that were out of the water were still invisible. I was watching
half a creature claw back to the main doors.

There were eight completely locked in the second
garden and three in the first garden which was also filling with
water. The three creatures in the first garden started climbing
back out the way they had come in. That would buy us time until
Station Ten arrived. Backup would be here in a matter of minutes
and I was no longer afraid. But I was really hoping that none of
the guys from Station Ten were going to be in that tunnel when the
creatures started climbing back out.

The water flowed like the main hull of a sub had been
breached. It was completely full in eighteen seconds. They had lost
their camouflage and their movements started to slow.

The four at the main door had started fighting each
other and two others had already stopped moving completely and were
floating in the center of the room. They must have been the injured
ones. After just a few minutes, the four creatures at the door
stopped moving and their wings quivered as they starting sinking.
The two injured creatures started seeping black ooze. Three
escaped, seven drowned and one was sliced in half.

“Yes!” Aaron said with excitement. I thought there
was some relief all together in the room, but when we lost the
cameras in the garden rooms, it seemed to diminish
significantly.

Danel didn’t share our excitement. It wasn’t over
until Station Ten arrived.

“The three that fled back to the elevator shaft will
find a new place to dig,” Danel said, killing Aaron’s
excitement.

Only a few minutes had passed and we needed a few
more before Station Ten arrived.

“Are you sure those doors have an airtight seal?”
Aaron said.

“Positive. Why?”

Aaron only looked down toward the door and all of our
eyes followed. There was water coming through the bottom and a lot
of it. Danel motioned for everyone to be quiet.

“It didn’t hold them,” Danel whispered.

“It may have taken most of them down,” I whispered
back.

OF ALL THE THINGS that could’ve appeared in my head,
I was thinking of Hell. There were no childhood images. There were
no thoughts of girlfriends, family or good liquor… just Hell. Not
because I believed I was going there, but because I’d never
believed. It was something that even in my nine-year-old Catholic
childhood, I’d never accepted, never absorbed. Hell was not a fiery
pit that swallowed evil. It was not Dante’s Inferno. It was not bad
karma. It was not Satan or God’s wrath. It was this. What you could
see. What you could feel. It was these things coming to physically
tear us in half. All of this sent another nauseating feeling
through my body.

We could hear the inhuman screeching in the halls
growing louder as they closed in on us. And just when I thought
they had reached the outside of the helm door, it grew quiet. I was
praying they hadn’t changed direction to the main hall.

The first impact against the helm door was so intense
we all jumped up out of our seats. They were right behind it. They
hadn’t left. The walls and floor of the control room trembled at
the sheer force, but the door held. The screeching wailed in the
halls. I could hear more than one, more than three screeching at
the same time. My entire body trembled.

There was another loud crash against the doors. It
was louder and had more force than the last one, like there were
two ramming it at the same time. The floor shook and the table and
chairs slid an inch or two out of place. Kye let out a slight gasp
and she quietly moved two steps to get behind the table farther
away from the door with the device in her hand. We needed the door
to hold, but we all knew it wasn’t going to.

Suddenly, the screeching stopped. For just a moment,
I thought maybe, just maybe, Station Ten was here. The silence
lingered behind the door, but there was no gunfire, just silence. I
closed my eyes for second, hoping they were not strategizing a new
plan. Then, there was a different sound: the unbearable scraping of
metal claws against the helm door. The creatures weren’t interested
in bashing through anymore. They were going to just tear it into
pieces. The sound of their claws cutting through the metal left a
high-pitched unbearable ringing in my ears.

It was only seconds before the eight-inch-thick door
started to buckle in the center and metal started to separate as
several six-inch hooks started to peel it back. We watched in
complete terror and even Danel trembled. After a few more minutes,
two had slashed a hole large enough to get their arms through. They
started cutting the air in the room with their razor-hooked
hands.

“Get back!” I yelled.

I ducked, quickly grabbing Kye’s hand and ran for the
back of the room. The entire floor was now covered in the orange
fluid from the gardens and I almost slipped twice. Aaron and Danel
rushed to follow me.

We all watched as the creatures’ arms reached into
the room. Their arms were larger and longer than my legs. It was
like huge black cables were swinging around, alive with
electricity. Then the arms pulled back out and several hooked claws
grabbed the bottom of the hole and started to peel the metal door
down.

I decided I wouldn’t wait to see if they had any
organs. I lunged three feet towards the door for close range and
shot one in the neck and one in the chest. I wanted a clear shot at
one of their heads, but only their arms and chests were pushing
through the opening. I leaped back to the other side of the room.
When I turned back around to see the damage I’d done, I saw holes
the size of my fist where I fired, but they didn’t stop. They
continued to move at the same speed, completely unaffected. I just
wasted two bullets.

When half of their bodies were through the doors, I
shot one in the head. I took off half its skull and it still kept
coming. The gun was slipping in my sweaty hands when I squeezed off
another shot, demolishing the other half of its skull and it fell
limp halfway through the door. The dead creature was then pulled
from the opening and another started coming through. Danel leapt to
the screen on the table to surge the doors, but just before he
could, the power went out. All was black except for Danel’s and
Kye’s glowing bodies as we listened to the metal doors being pulled
apart.