Charged - Book One (20 page)

The darkness was agonizing and the doors were not
electrified. I wanted a fighting chance and I wasn’t going to get
one. My eyes were not focusing. I looked all around for Aaron and
found Danel’s eyes, which were glowing orange. I went toward the
soft glow, shuffling quickly around the opposite side of the oval
table, praying I wouldn’t trip over a chair.

“One minute for auxiliary,” he whispered.

I reloaded the gun with the hollow points in less
than a second in the blackness, like I’d done a thousand times
before and handed it to him. He took the gun with his oversized
hand and hesitated. He hesitated long enough for me to wonder if he
would shoot me first. As if things couldn’t get any worse. But he
turned around and pushed me farther back in the room. I found Aaron
and Kye at the end of the table as my eyes finally focused.

“They’re coming in!” Danel shouted, his voice shaking
with fear.

Six more shots went off and he turned back, swinging
his extra-long arm and putting the gun in my face.

“Reload it!”

I grabbed the gun, reloaded and heard Aaron empty an
entire clip into the blackness. I returned the .357 back to Danel.
I wasn’t sure if he would hesitate again. I brought the box back,
so this was entirely my fault. And I had no choice other than to
give the alien who hated me, a gun loaded with hollow points. Just
as Danel turned around, the auxiliary power came on. There were two
inside the room and two more coming through the door.

“Surge the doors!” Aaron yelled.

Kye was back at the computer in lightning speed and
started tapping on the computer screen embedded in the oval table.
Daniel handed me the gun. And I blew the head off of one of the
creatures in the room.

“Shit!” Aaron yelled. His gun had jammed.

One of the creatures was on top of him in less than a
half a second and just as Aaron got the chamber emptied, the
creature rammed its razor hooked hand through his shoulder and
lifted him off the ground. I put three bullets in the creature’s
head and Aaron and the creature fell to the floor. There were more
climbing through the opening when Kye opened the circuit to surge
the doors. Their screeches filled the room. It felt like my
eardrums had burst. I covered my ears, dropping to the ground
overwhelmed with pain just when the auxiliary power cut out.

I forced myself to stand back up and one was hanging
from the ceiling face-to-face with me. I could hear nothing; my
ears made a strange muffled ringing sound as I stared directly into
its eyeless face. And my hand was empty, somehow I dropped my gun.
I could see its black silhouette outlined by Danel’s glowing eyes.
Danel was close. I could see him scrambling on the floor looking
for Aaron’s gun. Kye was right behind me, crouched down looking for
mine. The creature dropped to the ground in front of me, looking
down at me and swung its’ hooked enormous arms back to slice me in
half. But it didn’t; it paused. I watched as its midsection split
open and an enormous tongue-like flap with the consistency of black
tar darted out of its body. The black tongue wrapped itself around
my waist at a speed that was so quick I thought I was dreaming, but
I felt it. I felt it crushing me and pulling me towards it like it
was going to eat me.

I was yelling something, but I couldn’t hear anything
but muffled sounds out of my own mouth. Frantically, I tried to
pull the black tongue off of me as it started crushing me. It
started pulling me closer and I knew I would be snapped in half
before it pulled me all the way in. Its mid-sectioned mouth wasn’t
big enough to swallow me whole. It was unaffected as I punched over
and over at the tongue and I heard something snap inside my body.
From my left side shot an excruciating pain. A rib had snapped. I
saw something move from the right side and two shots went off. The
creature fell to the floor and the black tongue loosened
slightly.

“I gotcha, buddy,” Aaron gasped, dropping the gun and
passing out.

Kye pulled the tongue from around my waist and put
one more bullet in the creature’s head as I slumped to one side in
pain, gasping for air. After a few moments, I tried to stand up,
stumbling once and grabbed the table edge to steady myself. My
hearing cleared a little and Danel was standing in front of me. He
tapped a few squares on the oval table and auxiliary came back
on.

The floor was covered with dead creatures. The air
reeked of the burnt remains hanging in the door. I could taste the
smell in my mouth. It was toxic, like boiling ammonia. The room was
silent and motionless. I kept looking up, expecting another one to
fall from the ceiling, but this didn’t happen. Surging the doors
had worked. I started to count them on the floor to see how many
were left. There were five on the floor, but there was no way of
telling how many had survived the garden domes. At the moment,
there were no more standing outside of the door.

I found the revolver on the floor next to Aaron,
reloaded the empty chambers, but didn’t give it back to Danel. I
crouched down next to Aaron, where he lay with the dead creature’s
claw still in his shoulder. His pupils were dilated and he was
motionless. He was in shock.

“Aaron, can you hear me?”

“Six left, at most,” he whispered back at me. I sat
there looking at him. Somehow, I knew Danel hesitated. Somehow my
gut said that Aaron noticed something was off with him. He stared
at Danel and then his eyes closed, but he was still breathing. His
shoulder looked dislocated and he had lost a lot of blood. I needed
to find Jessica to heal him. Kye reached over and her hands glowed
orange around his head and Aaron closed his eyes. I didn’t know
what she was doing or how she was doing it, but there was no time
to ask.

“I’ve stopped the pain and I’ll try and stop the
bleeding,” she said, taking off her shirt and tying it tightly
around his shoulder. I stood up, grabbing the gun that Aaron had
and put in a new clip. Then I heard screaming. Not screeching; not
an animal.

Danel had turned on the audio to the main hall. It
was obvious that if they couldn’t get in, the creatures were going
to draw us out. Danel ran for the opening in the doors, but he was
too big to get through the gaping hole. It was long but too thin
for his thick chest to squeeze through. Then he tried to open the
doors with his bare hands, but it didn’t work. He ran over to the
oval table and tapped a number of buttons, but nothing worked and
the screaming continued. They were being slaughtered. His people
were unarmed and being sliced into pieces. I looked at the screen
for a moment; they were rushing at them, picking off the larger
males first. And Danel turned to me. Nothing could be real anymore.
But as much as I didn’t want this to be reality, all of this was
happening and I would die knowing it.

“Please help them! Station Ten will be right behind
you!” He pleaded with me. But I didn’t stop to listen. I handed him
the pistol and I squeezed through the gash in the door cutting my
leg in the calf. I tried to shake it off, but I felt blood running
down into my shoe and my broken rib was sending pain down my entire
left side.

I RAN WITH A FORCE that I didn’t know I had inside
of me. All I could see was Boyd and Ben and Jessica in my head. The
main hall was at the other end of the station and it seemed to take
forever to get there. The screams got louder and as I got closer my
heart sank with their cries.

I was in a horrible position. I couldn’t even see the
creatures. My panting now echoed in the hall and the pain in my
side was throwing my balance off. I just kept running toward the
main hall until I came to the large green doors with two large
gashes in it. It was horrific. Ten inches of a metal-like material
that was stronger than any on Earth had been pulled back like a tin
can.

Quickly, I checked to make sure I had extra hollow
points in my pocket. I should have done this before I left the
control room. I peered through the gashes in the door. I saw no
movement and no creatures inside. I crawled through the gash
successfully, not cutting myself again and my eyes were immediately
drawn to a glowing pink lab coat on the floor a few feet in front
me. I glanced all around the large room. The tables were overturned
and the oversized chairs thrown all over. There were smears of
glowing fluids on the walls, floors and tables everywhere. A few
steps closer to the glowing lab coat and I realized that it was
Ben.

Oh God, not Ben
.

He didn’t move. I wanted to check for a pulse, but
then I realized that I wouldn’t know where to check. He was almost
torn in half through the abdomen and his lab coat was saturated in
pink and purple glowing fluids. The large cut in his neck and his
lifeless eyes led me to believe that he was certainly dead. I
knelt, grabbing his hand and thought of Kye. This was horrible. My
hope sank as I stared at my dead friend.

Then something grabbed me. I turned my head to look,
but I couldn’t move. It felt like something grabbed my head and
neck but it wasn’t a hand. It wasn’t a claw. It wasn’t one of those
monsters’ tongues. My shoulders grew intolerably tense. I wasn’t
being moved or thrown by anything; I was just frozen. Frozen and
vulnerable to anything that was still in the room. My hand was
still clasped to Ben’s hand on the floor beside me. Panicked, I
struggled with all my strength to move again, but it was useless. I
took in my surroundings and tried to concentrate. I could still
feel my body, feel my rapid breathing. I just couldn’t control it.
I could hear my heart beating faster and feel the stiffness in my
neck and shoulders.

Then I noticed that the pink and purple fluids on
Ben’s body were moving, changing. They were slowly transforming
into a vapor-like substance as they crawled closer towards my hand
that was still touching his. A million fears and assumptions ran
through my mind. I tried to yank my hand out of his hand, but
nothing was effective. I was trapped, immobile. I stared at the
glowing vapors as they slid over my hand and started to sink into
my skin.

I could feel a cooling sensation sliding up my arm as
my heart pounded faster and faster. I didn’t really know anything
about this species.

Then Ben blinked and in a barely audible voice said,
“I’m sorry,” as he released his last breath.

Somehow I knew he was the reason I was frozen. I
could feel the vapors, or whatever they were, in my veins pulsing
with the quick rhythm of my own heart. The gasses reached farther
up into my shoulder and neck making me feel cold from the inside
out. Suddenly, I could feel how old Ben was and he was a lot older
than five thousand years; maybe seven, maybe ten. All I knew was
that he was older than Danel, but I didn’t know how I knew
this.

I needed to remain calm. I didn’t know if it was just
passing through me or going to just take my body over. A part of me
didn’t want to know. I wasn’t even sure if the other black
creatures were all dead. I knew it had only been a few moments, but
the immobility made it seem so much longer. I tried to think of Kye
and Aaron and how they might need me right now. I tried to move
again, but I was paralyzed. Then, everything changed.

IT WAS LIKE I WASN’T IN MY BODY ANYMORE. I could no
longer feel my body. I could no longer feel my heart pounding or
feel myself breathing. My head was swimming with vague sounds and
numerous voices. My mind surged with images and fragments of images
at such a speed it was like traveling through time. I saw a
multitude of alien faces: men, woman, Lyra, Collin, Danel, Alma,
Boyd and so many more. I couldn’t keep them straight. The images
were intertwined together, meshed together, overlapping one
another. I saw a whole planet of aliens. Millions, all distressed,
all terrified of something. And every one of them called me Ben.
But that was his name. I didn’t want Ben to die, but he was dying
and these seemed to be his memories. Thousands of years of memories
flashed before my eyes. This was more than any human could
absorb.

I knew this alien beside me. And now, I knew Danel
had lied. He had lied about everything. In the conference room, he
said they were two similar planets with similar species. This was a
lie. I watched the black creatures attack and conquer Tanjenna. Two
completely separate worlds with two different alien races. I saw
wars, explosions and destruction well beyond anything that had ever
happened on Earth. Two completely different creatures forced to
live only a few hundred miles from each other. It was only a matter
of time before they came and destroyed Ben’s world.

I saw battle after battle, only to watch Danel’s race
dwindle and eventually surrender. The Tanjennians were enslaved.
They were slaves to the very things that I’d led to the station. I
saw them secretly building the ships underground, one by one, over
many years. I saw a large group of aliens on their combined ships
make a pledge to never speak of it again. It was the past and
didn’t need to be remembered. It was over and gone. Aeyan, Collin,
Jessica and so many others were born here on Earth. They didn’t
know. The black-winged creatures didn’t want the ship. They wanted
revenge for the detonation of the sun that had destroyed both
planets. I tried to scan the images to see if Danel’s people were
responsible for the wars, for the destruction of their sun, but I
found nothing.

The memories came faster and faster and I could feel
my brain accepting them. It was almost like it was opening up more
space for more information as if new neuron pathways were being
created. I started to feel parts of my body again and became aware
that I was still in the main hall, but only for a moment. I felt an
overwhelming wave of information rush through my mind. I saw solar
systems passing through space and then fragments of history of
Earth. It was every moment of Ben’s lifetime, everything he’d ever
seen and experienced.